~ For human rights and against all kinds of ditnac

Monthly Archives: July 2014

Today I saw an awesome t-shirt. At first, I felt it was “awesome, period”. Then I had to settle for feeling that it is only awesome with some huge reservations. The basic message of the t-shirt was that the wearer thinks his daughter’s sex-life is her own business. Cool message, if the daughter is either adult or approaching adulthood. Not so cool off the daughter is closer to still being a little child. The problem here is when the concept of “child” or “teenager” is treated with dichotomism. That is, the bad habit of seeing categories as if they are absolutes, rather than as the sliding scales they usually actually are.

Children and teenagers mature gradually. As they mature, their parents need to gradually step back. Let the kids run more and more of their own lives, one step at a time.

The concept of “child” usually includes every person in the age between birth and the 18:th birthday, while the concept of “teenagers” includes every person in the age between the 13:th and the 20:th birthday.

One really creepy & destructive form of dichotomism here is to decide something along the line of “A child is a child: I will treat my 17-years-old as if she was 5”. Another dichotomism that is *also* creepy & destructive is to decide that “a teenager is a teenager: I will treat my 13-years-old as if she was 19”.

The concepts of freedom and responsibility need to be intertwined. The older children grow, the more they get ready to take their own chances, fend for themselves, and if necessary make their own mistakes.

Also… Parents setting rules for their children and for the child’s interaction with others should NEVER come from the parents having a sense of “owning” their children. It should always be only about protecting the child’s integrity. Age of Consent laws exist for good reason. And I don’t mean only sexual consent here, but also age restrictions for the labor market and the financial market and so on. We adults are free to freely take sexual lovers, finance partners such as employers or employees, and so on. This is not only about us owning our own bodies and so on, but it is also about each of us having the responsibility to care for our own lives, without any parent-figures to decide on a case-by-case basis what we can and cannot handle. Children have the same right to their own bodies and minds as adults do, but NOT the same responsibility to “make the right decisions, or take the consequences”.

Do you believe that those human beings who you see as being part of a certain category, such as those who have a gender or a certain religion, are in a certain way?
Oh, you probably do. Because that’s how the human brain works: It desperately needs to categorize. Without categories, it would never be able to get an overview of anything, and thus not able to understand anything. Categorization is a necessary tool.

However, please understand that this is all in your head. Categories exists only in minds, they do not have any existence that is independent of minds.

When you think that men, women, Christians, Muslims or Atheists are in a certain way… what you really do is that you create or reinforce a stereotype. This stereotype may or may not have a bit of statistical correlation to reality, but it can never BE reality.

When you create or reinforce a stereotype, you need to be aware of the fact that this is something you are doing. And you need to be aware that these stereotypes can be destructive. When you label certain human qualities as male or female, masculine or feminine, you might be limiting people’s possibilities. Limiting them by encouraging those humans labeled as “male” to distance themselves from the qualities labeled as “female”, and vice versa. You are basically telling them how they must limit themselves in order to be a REAL man or a REAL woman.

In reality, humanity is a really diverse lot. If you divide it into two halves by gender, each half is still just as diverse. And the same is true for any major religions. While a local religious congregation might have a consensus on what it means to belong to their religion, a world religion such as Christianity or Islam does not have any such consensus. Sure, there are many preachers who claim to know exactly who is or isn’t a REAL Christian or Muslim. However, this knowledge typically includes denouncing each other as being heretics and blasphemers and what have you.

Be it gender or religion or any other categorization, these visions of the real has nothing to do with objective reality. It is a purely subjective reality in your own head. Which doesn’t mean you made it up. In most cases, you got it from your local culture or subculture. You think it’s “real”, because people around you like you when you adhere to it and dislike you when you deviate from it. But that’s a group of people being subjective together and imposing arbitrary social norms on each other. It still exists only in your heads, although “heads” is in the plural rather than the singular.

Be careful with what you impose on others, and with what you impose on yourself.

Furthermore, please be careful with who you enter a discursive alliance with. What I mean with this is that if you emotionally dislike a certain category of people, you will be inclined to seek out the creepiest preachers of this category and agree with them on what it really means to belong to this category.

If you hate men, you will be tempted to seek out the most destructive ideal of masculinity you can find, and say “yup, that is what it means to be a man”. If you hate women or feminists, you will be tempted seek out the least reasonable version of radical feminism you can find, and put that on the very same pedestal. In both cases, you are actually a part of the problem here. By claiming that this is how men, women or feminists really are, you are actively participating in this destructive discourse. Because there are MANY men and women who are not like that, and feminism is a very wide and diverse field of study and activism.

Likewise, if you happen to hate Christians or Muslims or Atheists, you may be tempted to enter the same kind of discursive alliance with the worst representatives you can find. Thus actually fighting for them, fighting to give them power over those who have much better worldviews under the same labels.

Please understand that there is no such thing as one true masculinity, one true femininity, one true Islam, one true Christianity or one true Atheism. These words are labels, and they mean different things to different people. Which is as it should be: Human beings deserve freedom of religion and freedom of gender identity. Which includes the freedom for each human being to decide what meanings, if any, these labels have for them.

There is no need to fight for or against gender categories, and there is no need to fight for or against categories for religion or lack thereof. What we need to fight against is totalitarian and oppressive usage of these categories. Don’t tell people that they need to conform or else you will disqualify their identities. Don’t do that to people you feel are your friends, and don’t do it to people you feel are your enemies. Thanks.